Thursday 22 August 2013

Fukushima: The Most Deadly Cover-up

Never mind buggering about in Syria trying to engineer "regime change". The ongoing catastrophic leaks of radioactive waste at the tsunami-damaged Fukushima nuclear plant is the number one threat to global safety facing the world today, and needs massive international intervention, right now.

Japanese government is all about personally resigning when a situation gets out of hand, and passing the responsibility on to someone else, who then resigns, and so on: it's not about taking any meaningful responsibility, grappling with a situation and actually fixing it. Face is saved by hurling oneself on one's sword; social obligation is met, and yet the crisis which caused it in the first place remains, with nothing done.

It's abundantly clear that the Japanese government and TEPCO will not ask for international help. But this isn't a domestic Japanese issue; the Fukushima meltdown directly affects the northern hemisphere of our globe and the whole Pacific Basin right now, and the oceans of the world a few years down the line. It dwarfs Chernobyl into insignificance. The UN must resolve on multilateral efforts right now if we're to have any hope of stopping this global catastrophe.

It's almost impossible to overstate how bad this is getting. We're talking about an imminent constant major source of radioactive fallout covering the northern hemisphere, pollution of the Pacific and US west coast, and the evacuation of 40 million people around Tokyo and the Kanto basin. The northern half of Japan may become uninhabitable.

This isn't exaggeration: the post-tsunami multiple meltdown was mindboggling in its severity, the cover up since has been sinister and ongoing, with the global media refusing to even look and ridiculing those pointing out the problems. At last, the truth seems to be getting out. But will we do anything? Or is the military-industrial complex so hellbent on destroying Iran and capturing the Central Asian oilfields that they'll focus blindly on fomenting regime change in Syria while a valued and ancient culture in the Far East burns and dies?